Canvas allows you to use any image from the web or any image on your computer as the background of your browser. It allows you to move it, pin it and tile it to give it exactly the look you want. It even allows a web designer to specify exactly how they want an image to appear in Canvas with a few HTML attributes.

Adding an image from the web to Canvas is as easy as right clicking on an image and selecting "Add Image to Canvas." The image is immediately available in your browser. Try it with the image below:

By default, the image is in the upper left and is not tiled. This image would look much better tiled so click the Manage button to tile it, move it around, or change the menu and background colors. You can also give it a memorable name.

We said that by default Canvas does not tile the image and it puts it in the upper left. You might have an image that you want to make available for use as a background, but you want to designate how it appears in the users browser. You can do this by adding custom attributes to the image that allow Canvas to set the defaults for the image. Here's an example:

If you right click on this image, you'll see "Add 'Cliffs' to Canvas" instead of "Add Image to Canvas." After the image is added, it is aligned to the right and has a background color. You'll also notice that the image that was added is bigger than the preview image. This is because you can specify the actual image you want to be used in the browser separate from the image the user clicks on. (Note this feature can be used to trick you into using possibly inappropriate images, so just be aware of that). Here's the HTML from the example above:

The attributes map directly to the CSS attributes for the image, so you just set them to those values. You can also specify "menuColor" if your image needs a custom color for the menus.

We know this is a very nonstandard way to accomplish this, but we wanted something simple that anyone could use on their website. We'll be improving on this process in the future.

Canvas also supports Personas. If you go to getpersonas.com and right click on any image, you can add the Persona to Canvas. Note we do things a little different: we do not use the status bar image and we use the background color as the color of the status bar. We automatically determine a color for the status bar that works on that color. We also don't change the title bar color on Macs.

You may wonder why we added that feature. We worked very hard to support coexistence with Personas and I think we did a pretty good job. You can switch back and forth between Personas and Canvas. In the end we determined that it would be better for the user if they had one place where they could go to access all of their browser customizations.

Now that you have all these images added to your browser, how do you switch between them? The My Pix button. Clicking My Pix will display a list of all the images you've added to Canvas so you can quickly switch between them.

We think that Canvas opens up a whole new way to customize your browser and we have lots more ideas that we're excited to bring to the table. Keep watching this space. And download it here.

Note: Canvas from Brand Thunder includes the Surf Canyon extension. It also changes the default search engine to Yahoo! and adds search to new tab windows. We do this so that we can keep our extensions free. Obviously we'd love for you to use Yahoo!, but if you don't want to, feel free to change it back. We also can give you info on removing the tab search. Just let us know at getsatisfaction.com.